The Rules of the Assembly: Dancing at Bath and Other Spas in the Eighteenth Century

Allison Thompson

Allison Thompson (email: allisonthompson@juno.com)
is a dance historian, musician and writer. She has written
extensively about the folk dance revival in England and the United
States and is an authority on maypole dancing. Her most recent
book, May Day Festivals in America, 1830 to the Present,
was published in 2009. Allison is currently at work on dance in
Jane Austen’s lifetime, with particular reference to the music
in Austen’s manuscript books.

The
eighteenth century was the age of the public assembly, of social amiability,
of the pleasure in seeing and being seen.
This spirit was evinced in the popularity of promenades and pleasure
gardens, the rise of lending libraries and clubs, and the erection of
elegant assembly rooms in which crowds of well-dressed ladies and
gentleman danced and enjoyed each other’s company. But
even pleasure-seekers must be organized and directed. When Anne
Elliot and Catherine Morland (and Jane Austen herself) visited Bath,
they danced in rooms specially built by public subscription and
presided over by an elected Master of the Ceremonies who enforced
rules for proper attire and behavior. These “Rules of the
Assembly” also dictated the types of dances performed at these
public events. So popular were these public assemblies that
citizens of towns from Lyme Regis to Edinburgh built assembly rooms
and flocked to them to socialize. But as the century came to a
close, the attraction of public partying came to an end, and, as
Austen shows us, the upper and middle classes turned inward to the
more exclusive pleasures of private parties and balls.

The assembly rooms

In 1704 when the ailing Queen Anne came to drink the waters, Bath was little more than
a muddy village. Made fashionable by the Queen’s visit
and with the civilizing efforts of Richard “Beau” Nash,
Master of the Ceremonies at Bath from 1704 until his death 1762,
public assemblies at Bath and elsewhere in which the highest and the
upper middle classes could mingle in delighted amicability grew in
popularity. The elegance of the company required equally
elegant surroundings and from the mid-century on, bands of
subscribers in England and the major towns of Scotland and Ireland
built public assembly rooms for dancing, cards and other
entertainment. By 1770 there is evidence of more than 60 towns
and spas in England alone that had experimented with assemblies
(Borsay 151), and by 1801, Bath was the eighth largest city in
England with a population of 30,000. A society that in 1700 had
had no concept of a holiday resort now took travelling for pleasure
for granted. “Sixteen thousand strangers at Bath in the
season 1805!” wrote the diarist Caroline Girle Powys, a distant
relation of Jane Austen (358).

Public assembly rooms were designed to impress with their size and the elegance of
their appointments. In his work of 1799, The
Balnea: or, an Impartial Description of the Popular Watering Places
in England,
George Saville Carey provided an assessment of every spa-town’s
assembly rooms, showing how important these facilities were both in
the eyes of the visitors and to the towns’ ability to attract
tourists—a topic that Austen began to explore in her unfinished
work Sanditon.
Carey wrote, for example, that Cheltenham boasted two assembly
rooms: the upper ones “remarkably neat and elegant, the
chandeliers and lustres peculiarly brilliant”; the lower ones
“handsome, but inferior” (155). Margate’s
assembly room was “spacious, and a good object, standing in the
centre of the town” (7), but Scarborough’s was “nothing
to boast of in respect to elegance” (244), while Yarmouth’s
assembly room was “not of the first order, either in respect to
its elegance or the company that attend it” (264).

The queen of the assembly rooms outside London was Bath, especially after the New or
Upper Rooms were completed in 1771. The Lower Rooms, in Carey’s
estimation, were “handsome, commodious, and capacious,”
but the Upper Rooms “surpass[ed] every thing of that kind in
any town or city in the three kingdoms” (139). The size,
the brilliance of the lighting, and all the elegant appointments of
the Upper Rooms delighted visitors for several decades.

All of these purpose-built assembly rooms had three essential components:
the ballroom, the card room and the tearoom. While these were
separate spaces, they were interconnected to permit people to
circulate freely about, for the segregation of the assembly into
smaller coteries was explicitly discouraged: in the 1760s at
Bath, for example, it was the rule that “no large screens can
be brought to any card party in the Rooms on any account, as they
. . . divide the company into secluded sets, which is
against the fundamental institution of these places” (qtd. in
Borsay 273)

Assemblies in the provinces were of two sorts: those that attracted large numbers
of people annually or quarterly during the Assizes or Race Week, and
the regular and more socially homogeneous subscription assemblies of
the type that Austen attended as a girl at Steventon.
Assemblies could also vary in their degree of exclusivity, as shown
in this young girl’s letter from 1783:

Did I ever tell you of the London Assembly? I think not. It is at the London
Tavern, in the finest room that my eyes ever beheld. The walls
are coloured light blue, and ornamented with carvings and paintings;
a large recess at the lower end of the room is entirely of looking
glass. The curtains and sofas are of pale blue silk, with gold
fringe. The middle lustre cost 180 guineas. 120 couples
can dance in four sets, divided by ropes. The subscription is
five guineas for eight nights, and the requisites for appearing are a
dress coat or a laced frock. After all, it is much less genteel
than the City Assembly, to become a member of which requires as great
interest as to become a member of the House of Commons. (Beale 33-34)

As indicated in this letter, in the absence of a specially-built assembly room,
subscribers could dance in small ballrooms attached to an inn—such
as the Crown Inn that Frank Churchill waxes so enthusiastic about.
The Crown is “an inconsiderable house, though the principal one
of the sort.” A ballroom has been visibly added to the
original structure “many years ago” when the neighborhood
was in a more “particularly populous, dancing state, . . .
but such brilliant days had long passed away,” and it is now
used for a gentlemen’s whist club (197). Austen might
have occasionally danced in such a room, but we know that from 1792,
when she was just sixteen, to 1801 when the family moved to Bath,
Jane and Cassandra and their brothers attended the Basingstoke
Assemblies held in the Town Hall, which boasted a room that could
seat 300 built over a colonnaded area for market stalls (Vick).

One feature of the ballroom at the highest levels of society for a short period between
approximately 1808 and 1821 was that for the most special of events
the ballroom floors were decorated for ornament and for safety with
fanciful chalked devices such as arabesques, nymphs, and symbolic or
allegoric images. Thus, at the annual hunt ball in Warwick in
1813, the floor of the ballroom sported a colored-chalk full-length
figure of Guy, Earl of Warwick, “in complete armor,” as
well as another gentleman “in the uniform of a Member of the
hunt, taking a flying leap over a barred fence” (“Sporting
Intelligence” 243-44). The chalked images took a long
time to draw, and were an ephemeral beauty of the ballroom, quickly
blurred by the dancing feet, as mentioned in a poem by Thomas Moore,
published in 1813:

Thou know’st the time, thou man of lore!

It takes to chalk a ball-room floor—

Thou know’st the time too, well-a-day!

It takes to dance that chalk away. (Brown 39)

Critics deplored the expense of the ephemeral decoration, and the fashion probably did not
trickle down to the provincial assemblies, as Austen would certainly
have mentioned the chalk dust on the floor and shoes.

Whether at an inn or in Bath, a feature of the ball was the supper or tea offered midway
through the evening. The music stopped and couples processed to
the tea room to enjoy hot food, wine, tea, and sweets. Miss
Bates describes the handsomely-lit supper at the Crown as being like
a feast of Aladdin—“‘This
is meeting quite in fairy-land! . . . Such elegance and
profusion!’” (322-23, 330)—as did Austen’s
cousin Eliza de Feuillide when she attended a festivity in 1782 at
the court of Marie Antoinette (Austen Papers 101-03).

The supper was as lavish as one’s budget would allow, and those at
court were indeed fairytale-like. For example, to
celebrate the recovery of King George III from his first bout of
madness in 1789, the Queen gave a ball and supper. The hall was
beautifully illuminated, and everything was of the greatest splendor and richness.

That part of the supper which was hot consisted of twenty tureens of
different soups, roast ducks, turkey-pouts, cygnets, green geese,
land-rails, chickens, asparagus, peas, and beans. The cold
parts of the collation were the same kind of poultry boned, and
swimming or standing in the centre of transparent jellies, where they
were supported by paste pillars, not in circumference thicker than a
knitting needle. This, with the lights playing from the
candles, and reflected by the polish of the plates and dishes, made a
most beautiful appearance. Cray-fish pies of all kinds were
distributed with great taste; and the hams and brawn in masquerade,
swimming on the surface of pedestals of jelly, seemingly supported
but by the strength of an apparent liquid, excited general
admiration. (Watkins 362-63).

The Rules of the Assembly

Enter any assembly room in Great Britain (or North America) in the eighteenth century
and you would see its “Rules of the Assembly” prominently
posted on the wall. With no host or hostess to oversee
behavior, public assemblies needed to outline the rules of
precedence, dress, and expected behavior. The Rules functioned
to limit or control the attendance at the event, to moderate
expectations about the order of events, and to control conduct at
them. The Rules also invested the Subscribers’ authority
for the evening to the Master of the Ceremonies who ran the evening
and settled all disputes.

Richard Nash was the first to issue some rather facetious Rules to regulate public conduct
at Bath in the 1730s, and they evolved thenceforward. While
there are many similarities in the Rules found at various spa towns
or Assemblies, they were not uniform over time or location, although
they almost always opened with a statement that the subscribers alone
controlled the public amusements in the rooms. The Rules then
laid out the nights for different kinds of card, musical, or dancing
assemblies and the subscription prices.

A principal function of the Rules was to control admittance: while these were termed
“public” assemblies, the protocol involved in procuring a
ticket helped to keep out tradesmen—though it was not always
successful, as we shall see. Thus, in some cases gentlemen
subscribers were issued their own tickets plus one or two extra for
ladies; in other cases ladies purchased their own. Subscribers
could sometimes transfer extra tickets to non-subscribers; however,
in these cases, the Rules often dictated that the subscriber write
his or her name on the ticket, effectively creating an introduction
and thus limiting attendance.

The Rules almost always proscribed certain articles of dress: notably, no boots
or half-boots in the ballroom (though after 1800 officers on duty
seem to have been exempt from this ruling), and ladies who wished to
dance minuets were required to wear court dress, which included long
lappets or streamers of lace on their heads and the full hoops that
had been fashionable in the 1740s. The Rules also laid out the
orders of precedence: for example, brides and strangers
typically were permitted to stand first in the set and choose or
“call” the first country dance of the evening (as Mrs.
Elton does to Emma Woodhouse’s dismay); seats at the head of
the hall (“the Presence”) were reserved for ladies of
importance; after one danced down the dance, one was expected to
figure up it, and so on. Some Rules specified that the ladies
would draw numbered tickets for places in the set, which they would
retain for the evening; their partners, if they changed partners,
accompanied them to their places in the set. On occasion ladies
would draw (literally, some version of names in a hat) for partners,
as Austen notes in a letter to Cassandra on January 14, 1796.
These customs worked to prevent the gentlemen from picking only the
prettiest girls to dance with, and it also prevented the ladies from
scrambling to be first in line (and thus the first to call a dance).

The Rules were necessary as the Assembly did not always behave properly. For
example when Charles Macklin—actor, playwright, hard-drinker,
and womanizer—attended a ball at St. Albans with some friends
and two well-dressed prostitutes in 1740, they were at first much
admired as they were dressed “expensively,” but when one
of the ladies got into a dispute as to the priority of her place in a
country dance, “her language and temper soon
discovered her profession, and she, with her companion, were
instantly handed out of the room and the gentlemen desired to
follow.” According to Macklin, “We at first thought
. . . and talked of honour and satisfaction, and all that;
but numbers overpowered us; and, to avoid the fate of one of our
companions, who got a broad hint to leave the room [he was kicked down the stairs], the rest of us made
the best of our way out of the assembly-room” (Cooke 13-14).
The company’s fine attire had allowed them to enter the ball
room, but the inappropriate behavior of the women caused them to be
ejected from it.

The Master of the Ceremonies

From The New Bath Guide. 1799.(Google Books.)

Last, but not least important, through the Rules the subscribers to the Assembly gave
authority to the Master of the Ceremonies, who was charged to ensure
that society mingled amicably and with as little friction as
possible. Upon arrival at Bath or another spa, the visitor was
required to sign his or her name in the Pump Room book, after which
he or she was waited upon by the Master of the Ceremonies. He
welcomed visitors, inquired into their satisfaction with their
lodgings, ensured that they knew about the amenities of the city,
and, in effect, interviewed them to be sure that they were of an
appropriate quality to enter his domain. Thus, when Mr. James
King—a real person and the M.C. who effected the introduction
of Mr. Tilney to Miss Morland—added the duties of M.C. at
Cheltenham to those of Bath in 1803, he wrote in his Rules that “as
it is absolutely necessary that no improper company should be
permitted to frequent the assembly rooms, the Master of the
Ceremonies particularly requests, that all strangers, (ladies as well
as gentlemen), will give him an opportunity of being introduced,
before they hold themselves entitled to receive that respect and attention, which is not more his duty
than his inclination to observe” (Feltham 43).

King, who had served in the British army during the American war, began his rule in Bath
in 1785, when he was elected without opposition as M.C. of the Lower
Rooms. In 1805, King became M.C. of the more prestigious Upper
Rooms and reigned there until his death in 1816. Austen knew
very well that her contemporary readers would enjoy the joke of
having this illustrious gentleman introduce her characters to each
other, and this may be one of the first, if not the first, examples
of interpolating a real person into a work of fiction.

Besides vetting strangers, the Master of the Ceremonies reigned over the dance floor,
ensuring the precedence of rank and minimizing quarrels and heartache. The role

of the master of the ceremonies is to introduce regularity into large assemblies, to keep order, to
repress the ebullitions of passion, to banish, if possible, that contraction or thrusting out of the lips which Shakespear calls
pouting; to prevent violent suffusions or flushings in the female countenance; to keep the ladies from tossing
[their heads], and their noses from turning up, when precedence, partners, and
people that nobody knows, with a hundred other serious
circumstances, excite those emotions. He has also annexed to his office
something clerical, it being his business to join hands:
but he goes still farther, he frequently procures partners,
who sometimes under his banners enlist for life.
(Moser 190)

The position of the M.C. was lucrative as well as socially desirable, and it was coveted
on both counts. For example, when one of Nash’s
successors died in 1769, there was a violent dispute between two
candidates for the position. Circulars and pamphlets were
issued, there were unruly meetings and even fisticuffs. When
one candidate appeared in the Assembly Room, a supporter of his
adversary pulled him out by the nose. Two weeks later there was
a great encounter between the two parties. A friend of the
aggrieved candidate rose to speak, and his voice was drowned out by
hisses. This abuse was followed by blows and then a general
melee, “in which the women were well to the fore.”
According to one account, women actually began the fray, tearing each
other’s dresses, laces, and hair. It took the arrival of
the Mayor, accompanied by officers of justice, to read the Riot Act
three times to quell the uproar (Barbeau 112-14). After tempers
cooled, a third gentleman, Captain Wade, was elected by common
agreement.

Upon his election to the Lower Rooms, Captain Wade was presented with a badge of office:
a gold medallion of enameled blue set round with brilliants with a
raised figure of Venus and the motto Venus decens,
and on the reverse a wreath of laurel with the motto Arbiter
elegantiarum communi consensus.
Catherine Morland would subsequently have seen this medallion on Mr.
King’s breast. In 1808, a wag described such a “Monarch
of etiquette” at Bath as possessing

An evening at either the Lower or Upper Rooms at Bath prior to about 1800 began with the
minuets, a dance for only two persons at a time, and one that
engendered tremendous social anxiety—even sensations of
“terror”—as one performed surrounded by 500 or more
critical spectators. The minuet was king of the ballroom for
most of the century, declining first in the provinces when Austen was
a teenager though it remained obligatory at Court until the King’s
final illness (Dain). Those who wished to display their talents
in the minuet applied to the Master of the Ceremonies, who arranged
partners by rank and suitability. Since typically more ladies
than gentlemen wished to dance, a gentleman “walked” the
minuet with first one lady, then a second. Ladies were required
to wear the enormous hoops that formed Court dress, as well as
lappets, streamers of lace on the head. Gentlemen wore
full-bottomed coats, vest, and knee-breeches. Both sexes wore
high-heeled pumps.

Did Jane Austen dance the minuet? We do not know for sure. She and
Cassandra attended boarding school only for two short periods when
Jane was quite young. Since the minuet continued to be taught
to children until the 1820s, it is probable that the Austen girls
learned the dance. They may never have danced the minuet in
public, however, as it had already died out at the Basingstoke
Assembly by 1793, when Jane was seventeen. When Eliza Smith
married the Austens’ wealthy neighbor William Chute in late
1793, the young woman was apparently so nervous about appearing at
public balls that her mother wrote: “I am glad for your
Sake there are no Minuets at Basingstoke, I know the terror you have
in dancing not that you have any occasion for such fears” (qtd.
in Tomalin 97).

At the end of the hour of minuets, the ladies retired to remove their hoops and
returned for the country dances. Again, the M.C. would organize
the places for the ladies and regulate the order of the “calls”
for the dances, directing the musicians when to begin and when to
stop playing. The country dances were not, however, as we dance
them today: they were danced with steps (the ones that Fanny
Price practices), rather like modern Scottish country dancing; they
were danced in triple minor sets (that is, groups of three couples
within the major set); and they were started by the top couple
dancing only with couples two and three, working their way down the
line and gradually involving all the other couples, and then figuring
their way up it. The choice of which English country dance to
perform was given to the topmost lady in the first set, and she chose
the tune and then set figures to it—that is, the figures were
not so firmly attached to the tune as we find in modern English
country dancing. After she called her choice of tune, the
second lady in line had her turn and so on. If there were
multiple lines of country dancers, the first lady in the second set
called the second dance, and the first lady in the third set called
the third.

After the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, cotillons
or cotillions, a French dance for two or four couples in a square
formation, became popular. Featuring complex footwork,
cotillions had a standard set of “Changes,” such as
circle to the right and then the left, turn partner by the right and
left and so on. Each Change was followed by a complicated
“Figure” that was distinctive to each tune. Because
of their length and difficulty, cotillions tended to be limited to
one or two in an evening. The Scottish reel, though popular in
more informal settings, does not seem to have been danced at Bath,
and the turning waltz and the quadrille did not become generally
popular until after 1814, though Austen refers to Frank Churchill and
Emma Woodhouse dancing a country dance in waltz time.

On the stroke of eleven—“the fatal hour
at which the ball is to conclude”—the M.C. held up his
watch, “when, in a moment, as if the Gorgon’s
head had been exhibited, every fiddler’s
arm is arrested, and no further steps taken
for the evening” (Pallet, Bath Characters xvii).
This rule had been laid down by Beau Nash early in the
century on the grounds that many at Bath were invalids and needed
their rest.

Since popular M.C.s like James King held multiple posts, the “Season” was not
the same at all spas and watering-places. The Season at
Margate, for example, commenced on the King’s birthday,
formally celebrated in June, and ended in late October, whereas
Bath commanded the more fashionable months of October through May.
The hours and pricing of the summer balls were usually different from
those of the winter. In Persuasion,
Austen shows us that Lyme Regis is a summer seasonal resort, not a
full-fledged spa town, for the Assembly Rooms are closed when the
Musgrove party visits in late November (95).

The admixture of the Vulgar and the decline of the Assembly

In the days of King Nash, one could be accepted as one of the Assembly at Bath by simply
dressing well enough and behaving adequately. As Lord
Chesterfield wrote mid-century with disdain, “A gentleman is
every man, who with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side,
and a watch and a snuff box in his pockets, asserts himself to be a
gentleman, swears with energy he will be treated as such and that he
will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary”
(285). This ability for those of lower ranks to infiltrate the
assemblies and promenades of the nobility was such that in 1766 it
was reported still favorably of the spa at Tunbridge Wells that “all
ranks are mingled together without any distinction. The
nobility, and the merchants; the gentry, and the traders, are all
upon an equal footing, without anybody’s having a right to be
informed who you are, or whence you came, so long as you behave with
that decorum which is ever necessary in genteel company” (Benge
121).

This use of attire and basic decorum to define a gentleman worked well during the years
that only wealthy gentlemen could afford the proper attire, but as
the middle class grew in number and in affluence, the system began to
break down. By the end of the century, complaints about the
mixing of society were common. Lady Rodolpho Lumberco in
Charles Macklin’s play The Man of the World
(1781), describes Bath society as being a “very great mob
there, indeed, but very little company.” She gripes that
all are brawling over whist tricks: “a peer and a
sharper, a duchess and a pinmaker’s wife, a boarding-school
miss and her grandmother, a fat parson, a lean general, and a yellow
admiral” (32). After 1771, when the Upper Rooms were
opened, they commanded a more elite assembly than the Lower Rooms.
Thus, in his poem of 1808, “Rebellion in Bath: Or, The Battle
of the Upper-Rooms,” the author Peter Pallet notes that the
company in the Upper Room includes a sleek parson, a fair maid, proud
peers, fat dowagers, and half-pay Irish officers in search of a
fortune, such as the scheming Captain O’Brien who marries Emma
Watson’s wealthy aunt: “All, save Bath tradesmen,
and such common stuff, / Who, banish’d from the fashionable
ball, / Cut vulgar capers in the vile Town-hall” (4).

In his 1819 work, Walks through Bath,
Pierce Egan quotes a poem that ridiculed that part of Bath society
that excluded the tradesmen of Bath from attending the dress boxes of
the theater or the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms—ridiculed the
exclusion, yet hinted at the underlying social anxiety that created
it:

Here, salutary rules exclude all those

Whom no one hears of, and whom no one knows;

That no plebian breathings may infect

An atmosphere at all times so select;

No bankers’ clerks these splendid realms invade;

No FOLKS who carry on a retail trade;

No actors by profession must appear

To act their parts, or speak their speeches here;

Yet even here, amid the crowds you view,

’Tis sometimes difficult to tell WHO’S WHO. (151)

As the new century opened, the mixing of society had become too much; the upper classes
no longer tolerated the increasing encroachments of the middling
sort. Attendance at public assemblies began to fall away in
favor of private entertainments. Austen shows us this change
when Sir Walter Elliot and Miss Elliot prefer to spend their evenings
“solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties”
rather than attending the theater or the Rooms, where Anne would have
a chance of seeing Captain Wentworth (180).
Now that public assemblies had given the upper class the idea of pleasant
socializing, they began to add ballrooms to their own houses and give
private balls to exclude encroachers. Mirroring this social
change, after the Peace Congress of Vienna, the quadrille, a dance
for eight intimes and the turning waltz, a dance for only two, replaced the jovial and
democratic country dance, in which one danced with every couple in
the set. The Age of the Assembly was over.

The Lower Assembly Rooms, Oct. 1, 1787.

The Master of the Ceremonies respectfully submits the following regulations to the Company for their assent:

1st. That the seats at the upper end of the room be reserved for Peeresses, and Foreign Ladies of distinction.

2dly. That Ladies who dance minuets be permitted to sit in the front of the
side-rows, to avoid giving unnecessary trouble to those who do not dance.

3dly. That Ladies who dance minuets be in full dress, with lappets:
Gentlemen also in full dress: those of the army or navy are considered very properly dressed when in uniform,
with their hair en queue.

4thly. That after a Lady has called a dance, it being finished, her place in
the next dance is at the bottom.

N.B. It is deemed a point of good breeding for Ladies that have gone down the
dance, to continue in their places, ’till the rest have done the same.

5thly. That those who stand up after the country-dance is called, do take
their place at the bottom, unless rank entitles them to precedence:
And the Ladies are requested not to permit the intrusion of any
couples above them, such compliance conferring a partial obligation,
to the material inconvenience of those who stand below them.

6thly. That as the Subscription Balls end precisely at eleven, the Company
do assemble as soon as possible after six o’clock.

7thly. That each Lady and Gentleman on publick nights pay sixpence on
entering the room, which will entitle them to tea.

8thly. That Ladies may, if they please, wear hats in the publick Rooms in
the evening, except on Ball or Concert nights:—Gentlemen are
not to wear boots in the publick Rooms in the evening, nor spurs in
the Pump-Room of the morning.

9thly. That no hazard or unlawful games will be allowed in these Rooms on
any account whatever, nor cards on Sundays.

Lastly.
That Ladies and Gentlemen coming to town, give orders that their
names and places of abode be entered in any of the Pump-Room books;
and the Master of the Ceremonies thus publickly requests the favour
of such Ladies and the Gentlemen to whom he has not the honor of
being personally known, to offer him some favourable occasion of
being presented to them, that he be enabled to shew that attention,
which is not more his duty, than his inclination to observe.